Six Degrees

Hello everyone and welcome to this new section of Fresh on the Net, Six Degrees.

Every week I will feature 6 bands that have already featured in some way on Fresh On The Net – two videos, two songs and two live performances.

In order to reinforce the work of the bands and artists that have participated in Fresh On The Net, Six Degrees is designed to track the progression of these musicians. Often bands and artists have success at having their work featured in magazines or blogs, but what happens next?

Magazines and blogs aren’t always able to continue to feature these artists and many times pass them up for another band with new releases. In 6 degrees, I will try to return to these bands, keeping alive their work and encouraging them to move forward, as many of these artists are in very early stages of their career.

In this section I will try to highlight artists who may not have reached the Fresh Faves, but who have not gone unnoticed by the team – and especially by me. Everyone who votes here every weekend knows how difficult it is to choose just 5 artists. Many of us include comments about another 5 or 10 of them that we would have included.

In Six Degrees, any band that has been in the batch of the 30 artists on the listening post that it is published every weekend can be included, and I want to keep encouraging them to keep and grow that participation.

With the help of Tom and Johnno, we have designed a format of 6 bands (two in each category – video, song and live performances), mixing artists from the Fresh Faves with those who were popular with our team, and those that I personally like best.

I hope you enjoy this section of Fresh On The Net and that it becomes so successful that I can include even more bands in the future.

Thank you and enjoy!

Music Videos

Intervals – Water

Motivation, effort and determination are the principles that are outlined in this beautiful video from Intervals. And these are the same principles that many musicians practice when they are learning an instrument or during the rehearsal of a certain sound. Music and sport are often marked by the same road.

But music is also about having fun and it has a thousand ways of expression. Not always the most difficult path leads to the best result. The music of Sex Hands is one example of this and with less formality it produces on me other sensations that I need in my daily life.

By the way, have you ever played with your dog’s mouth while it sleeps? Making thousand of faces by moving its nose up and you see its teeth? This funny video has many of those doggy faces that I’m talking about.

Music/mp3

Magic Arm – Through The Mire

Another track from one of the top 10 bands that were on the listening batch 32 last week and that I personally like very much. It is very gratifying when we find a new band that we like, but it is even more gratifying when we follow that band and we find out that we like so many tracks from them.

“Bella The Butcher” is perhaps the most conventional song of this Londoner indie rock band, JoyLand. With dark atmospheres that open progressively, the band is completing the release of a brilliant work, including other great tracks like “Whitebate“, “Trucks Of The Sea” and “H.O.M.E“.

Live Sessions

Live sessions will be the part of this series of posts that will include gig videos, acoustic sessions, studio sessions, radio performances, and any other kind of live records.

In order to have a closer overview of the different bands and artists participating on Fresh On The Net, in this subsection I will try to bring an approach of their live music, from groundbreaking and wild performances, to sensitive and romantic ones.

Melissa James is one of the artists that I have known trough Fresh On The Net and that I have been following since then. With a wonderful voice and style, Melissa’s work touches different genres like Blues, Jazz and Soul defining an elegant fusion of sounds.

This performance was recorded at The Green Note in Camden on Thursday 21 June 2012, during the celebration of Melissa’s debut album launch party, Day Dawns.

mar

Hi, I'm Mar, a member of the Fresh On The Net team. I am a biologist, and I work at a research laboratory. I became interested in music as a child and studied Music Theory, Piano and Choral Singing for more than one decade. Although the circumstances steered me into Biology, I have never been cut off from the music. Since always I've had a predilection for Scottish, Irish folk, Breton and Galician music, but I have a large collection of world music. With my trips to Brazil I added from Bossa to Samba, Samba Reggae, Pagode, Sertanejo..., but above all, a wide range of current Brazilian rock musicians, entirely unknown in the international market. Hence, when I returned to Spain, and later moved to Los Angeles (California), I was bored by the monopolized commercial music that was on the radio. This, the gradual disappearance of good record stores and the possibilities offered by the Internet, sparked my curiosity for other forms of music and the independent music media. Following that path I founded “Jungle Indie Rock” with my best friend, a music blog where we have fun and we feature independent bands and artists. I still travel a lot, looking for new sites, sounds and rhythms. I currently live in Madrid and landed here in 2012 at Fresh On The Net :)

Hi Len, thank you :) I am listening and following bands/artists from batch 1 to batch 32 (last one). At this moment I am at batch 14. Basically, any of the bands that have being featured on the listening posts every weekend, can be added here. I track/listen/save their works by Soundcloud, Youtube and Facebook, using an account made for 6 degrees. Slow, but efficient :)

What a great idea. It’s true: the album is released, the reviews come out, the buzz is fantastic but then it all dies and what do you do? You need to keep moving forward as an artist but it’s hard to keep the music in the spotlight once the release date has passed. Thank you so much for featuring me here..yet again. Really appreciate the love and the support. Enjoyed checking out the other artists too. :-))

Hi Mar… good work, this whole enterprise deserves more attention than it currently achieves… as much as I can I spread the word I do – I might try and do something on reddit… it never ceases to amaze me how select an audience this whole ‘fresh on the net’ thing is …. thank goodness for the regulars on here – for any bands reading this – I can only say that there are opportunities to be had – but you have to seize them… the world is what you make it

Thank you John, Johnno and Melissa. That was the original reason for this section. And I have to say that Johnno helped a lot discussing how to do it. And Tom giving a decisive touch to it.

I think that many readers appreciate different songs apart of the standard singles and video releases. We want to feature more artists and this make us to pass to other works. Only as listeners we can really keep the music alive. And we are all listeners. I am very happy to have the opportunity to do this section.

Sorry Len, I just saw your post. Thank you again :) this is a good point all the people that come every weekend to listen to the music. They are very committed. And they get so happy when “their” bands make it. They say “my 5, my bands”. I love that.

Thank you again. The clue is on the organization of the subscriptions. The time invested at the beginning will save a lot of time in the future. I will have all the music and videos on my dashboard soon, listed by dates. But I want to remark that this work is just 1 step after the work that FOTN team has done listening to bands every week, and the public listening to them later. Not my merit.